Survey Of India says Google Maps is Unreliable, Will Makes it’s Own Maps Available Instead

Google Maps is undoubtedly one of the most used apps of all time. Billions of people use it on a daily basis across the globe to get from point A to point B. And same is the case with India. Over the course of time, apps like Google Maps, etc. are becoming more and more popular even in India where no one knew about these services a couple of years back. However, India’s mapping and surveying agency, Survey of India say that Google Maps in unreliable. In fact, they also said that even Google Earth is unreliable and they are asking users not to use them.

Survey of India said that neither of these two services are authenticated by the Government, and in order to encourage people to stop using it, they are making their own maps available instead. The surveyor-general of India, Swarna Subba Rao said that the service could only be used with casual applications that don’t require a high level of accuracy. He also noted that the Government doesn’t reply to it. This is indeed a bold claim considering that millions of people even within India are using the service on a daily basis.

While it makes a lot of sense since the data which Government has is probably a lot more reliable in comparison to Google has. However, it is not exactly clear at the moment as to what makes the Government think that way. It is also worth noting that this is not the first time that Indian Government has found a fault in Google’s mapping service. It has been reported that Cambodia and India had once protested with Google on how the borders were presented on the service. In order to solve the issue, Google then released different versions of the service to comply with different regulations.

A ton of apps which we use on a day-to-day basis like Uber, Ola, etc. also uses Google Maps to help navigate the users across various locations. It will be interesting to see if things really change over time. As far as the Government’s own maps are concerned, it looks like the maps are still being uploaded, and the website seems to have some glitches. Hence we might have to wait a bit longer to see these maps in action.